Connecticut aerospace pioneer Charles Kaman, founder and chairman emeritus of the Kaman Corp. in Bloomfield, died Monday morning. He was 91.
Kaman founded the Kaman Aircraft Corp. in 1945 and led the company as CEO for 55 years. He started the company with $2,000 invested from friends to demonstrate a rotor concept to make helicopters easier to fly.
Today, the Kaman Corp. is a multi-billion-dollar company involved in producing aerospace components, including fuzes for Air Force bombs, and oilfield equipment and services.
He and wife, Roberta, who died last June, also founded the Fidelco Guide Dog Foundation to provide canine companions to the blind.
“In the end, Charlie Kaman was all about human potential,” Kaman Chairman and CEO Neil Keating said in a statement. “Of all of his technical accomplishments, he was most proud of the more than 15,000 lives that Kaman helicopters were estimated to have saved in rescue missions over the second half of the 20th century.”
In 1997, Charles Kaman received the nation’s premier aviation award — the National Aeronautic Association’s Wright Brothers Memorial Trophy — joining other recipients such as Charles Lindbergh, Neil Armstrong and Igor Sikorsky.
